With Envoys new contract, we are now one of the lowest paid regionals. Classes are full, but I feel like this is finally going to start catching up to company when they are wanting to expand (slowing the amount of ac we are taking on). Time for a new contract. Anyone heard anything?

Much like the rest of the UEX regionals you are being taken for granted. UEX carriers have the worst contracts and worst career progression. Spirit, Frontier, JetBlue, Allegiant, and the ACMI cargo carriers love hiring us.

Get out and go to these places which pay more, have better schedules, and can spring board you to a legacy if you so choose.

This, United is behind the curve^

I was talking to a recruiter at Oshkosh today and they told me they are beginning to pull back on class sizes as they are too fat on the FO side. I guess the contract isn’t keeping people away.

I feel the company is going to ride out the current contract as far as they possibly can. They must know once negotiations start, the pilot group is going to be asking for major QoL and pay improvements and not getting them is going to be a non-starter.

I doubt that pay is the big stumbling block. While we're one of the lower paid companies, no one is at a regional for pay. It's the QoL that's the stumbling block, because it's going to prevent the company from hosing the pilots to staff the company every time there's an issue in EWR (which is every day). No more unlimited extensions, no more 90+ hr 'minimum credit' lines, no more pulling lines and throwing line holders on reserve to entice pilots to fly on their days off, and no more pulling line holders for training. The joke that we're all reservists with varying days off is very true at this company.

They've not been receptive to the unions offers to start negotiating early (and the MEC has been unwilling to agree to LOAs to patch the current contract since we're so close to our contract becoming negotiable). Tight now they can deflect any criticism by saying they're not negotiating right now. Once negotiations begin, the line pilots are going to start asking why the company isn't willing to give us a contract with the improvements that are fairly industry standard at this point. Aren't we a 'family' company?

They've done the 'we're over staffed on FOs before' and pulled back on recruiting and it's been disastrous. It's partially why we have no new CAs that are home grown, we didn't hire FOs in 2017 and now there's no one coming up on 1000 hours to upgrade. The company is extremely bad at figuring out long term staffing and instead survives on a model of what they need next month. That doesn't work in new hire (because it takes ~3 months to get a new hire through training) or figuring out CA staffing (because it takes ~2 years to make a home grown CA).

Now the company has up the DEC bonus to 50k.

Doesn't surprise me. I've been taking data samples from the seniority list for the last 6 months and while we did manage to mint a bunch of captains when the $45K bonus was introduced, the number of takers has diminished somewhat the last couple of months. Combine that with losing captains off the top now as fast as we can mint them and the numbers are stagnant.

It is going to be interesting to see the mass exodus of junior FOs to the other well paying regionals. With all the FOs sitting reserve currently and no line in sight anytime soon, who would blame them if they go to another well paying regional. At least sitting reserve there, they will be flown more, paid more, have better QoL, and have a flow (because the CPP is awesome, right?) in their back pocket. Wouldn’t be too surprising to see the pilot group shrink back down to the low 300s in the next month or two between all the CAs and FOs leaving.

What are the stipulations for the 50k bonus?

1000 hours 121